Cliffhangers attempted to revive the genre of movie serials in a made-for-TV format. Each hour-long episode was divided into three 20-minute segments featuring different storylines. During the series' run, three serials were featured - a mystery, a science fiction/western hybrid, and a horror story:
"Stop Susan Williams": Susan Anton stars as a beautiful TV journalist investigating the murder of her brother, and stumbling on a vast international conspiracy. This featured series drama also co-starred Ray Walston.
To add to the "in-progress" feeling of the proceedings, all three series were started with different chapter numbers : "Stop Susan Williams" began at Chapter II, "The Secret Empire" started with Chapter III, and "The Curse of Dracula" with Chapter VI. The series was cancelled after only 10 episodes were aired, by which point only "The Curse of Dracula" had reached its conclusion. However, one unaired episode featured the two concluding chapters of "The Secret Empire" as well as the final part of "Stop Susan Williams." American viewers later got a chance to see the concluding part of "Stop Susan Williams" in the TV-movie The Girl Who Saved The World which re-edited the 11 installments into a single two-hour movie.
"The Secret Empire" was a pastiche of the Gene Autrymovie serialThe Phantom Empire. Scenes in the futuristic underground city were in color, but scenes in the 19th century Wild West on the surface were sepia-toned.
"The Curse of Dracula" revolved around the notion that after 600 years, Dracula was getting tired of immortality and, in pursuit of the love of a beautiful woman, sought mortality so that he could live out his days with her.
Cliffhangers was an expensive production due to three simultaneous production units being required. The hope was that if, after 10-12 serial episodes, a serial caught on, that it could be spun off as a series, but the series aired opposite Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, the #1 and #2 most popular shows in television at the time, and was cancelled after 10 episodes. The series was created by Kenneth Johnson and staffed by many young writers who went on to become quite successful, including, Craig Faustus Buck, Harry Longstreet, Renee Longstreet, Andrew Schneider, Sam Egan, Richard Christian Matheson, and Jeri Taylor.
